How stepping outside the box helped win the war

Thu, 04/26/2012 – 8:10am

• Salisbury

By

Patrick L. Sullivan

patricks@lakevillejournal.com

Historian Paul Kennedy spoke April 20 of the joys, challenges and triumphs of unconventional thinking. Photo by Patrick L. Sullivan

LAKEVILLE — Yale University professor and historian Paul Kennedy was sitting in an armchair on the stage as people filed into Elfers Hall at The Hotchkiss School Friday, April 20, for his Salisbury Forum appearance.

He never budged.

He disclaimed any intent to create an F.D.R. fireside chat image. He had already spent the day teaching and wasn’t enthusiastic about the prospect of standing in front of a lectern for that evening’s talk.

Seated, he still managed to cover a lot of territory as he talked about his latest book, “The Engineers of Victory 1939-1945: The Forerunners of Steve Jobs.”

Kennedy said four years ago his literary agent asked if there was something he’d like to publish for his own pleasure. Kennedy replied he’d like to go back to the subject of World War II; he had started his writing career as a research assistant for Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart, a prominent military historian.

Kennedy, who is a professor of history and is the director of international security studies at Yale, said he didn’t want to write a general history, but was “interested in a particular level of people who worked for victory.”

“There are lots of books about the men at the top, and lots of grunts. The people in the middle get little attention.”

The people in the middle “are the problem solvers, the people who get things done, who think through knotty challenges and work toward solutions.”

Kennedy read a magazine article about Steve Jobs which got him thinking about the role of the problem solver. Jobs “was not an inventive genius,” said Kennedy. “He was not a Leonardo. He was a borrower, an adapter, an organizer and a manager.”

Jobs was one of “the people who, when given a problem, see it can be done in a better way, a different way. Such people have to be given freedom.”

Kennedy’s book focuses on four “tweakers” whose contributions, largely unsung, were crucial in winning the war.

The problems

Kennedy said in the middle of the war, “the Allies hadn’t lost but hadn’t won either.”

The Allies needed to do five things: protect merchant shipping in the Atlantic; control the air over France and Germany; assist the Soviets in blunting the German Blitzkrieg; “figure out how to land millions of men on hostile shorelines”; and be ready to move troops and materiel 7,000 miles across Pacific.

Kennedy said these goals were set in January 1943 at a conference in Casablanca. Two months later, merchant shipping losses in the Atlantic were heavier than ever. Allied bombers, the B17s and B24s, “were getting shot to ribbons.”

And in October 1943, 66 Flying Fortress bombers were shot down in a single morning.

The Allies suffered from bloody and futile landing attempts at Dieppe in France and Dakar in what was then French West Africa (now Senegal).

And in the Pacific 1,000 Marines were killed in a few hours at the island of Tarawa.

“The end of the war was not inevitable,” said Kennedy, but “given the preponderance of productive power, the Allies would win eventually.”

Solution: The Mustang

Enter the problem solvers and tweakers.

Ronnie Harker, an Englishman, was a World War I and Rolls Royce test pilot. During World War II he was also testing captured German aircraft and generally making himself useful.

The Royal Air Force (RAF) in the spring of 1942 had a bunch of P51s, a low-flying pursuit fighter commissioned by France. The RAF was not happy with them and was ready to scrap them.

Kennedy said someone at the RAF’s training facility suggested getting Harker to give the P51 one last look. Harker flew the plane three times.

“He marvels at its ability to turn on a dime. He can’t stall it — but he can’t get it above 19,000 feet,” — not nearly enough altitude, when Allied Liberators flying at 24,000 feet were getting shot down by Germans fighters flying at 30,000.

Harker noticed the distance between the P51 cockpit and nose is 93 inches, the same as the RAF’s Spitfire fighter, and suggested putting the Spitfire Rolls Merlin engine in the P51.

It was a success. The nimble plane, with the additional power, did things previously thought impossible.

But this particular bit of tweaking didn’t have an effect until 20 months later, because bureaucrats in Washington blocked the P51.

“Only when the 66 B17s were shot down did [U.S. Army Air Force General] Hap Arnold lose his temper and demand a long-distance fighter that could protect the bombers,” said Kennedy.

Production then cranked up and gave the world the plane subsequently known as the Mustang.

“What if?” asked Kennedy. What if nobody had thought of Harker? What if the distance from cockpit to nose had not been 93 inches? What if nobody read Harker’s report?

“By D-Day the Allies had 11,000 aircraft; the Luftwaffe had 875.”

Unexpected innovations

Admiral Ben Moreell, who was friendly with F.D.R., was in charge of building new naval harbors and airbases before the war. He visited Pearl Harbor in 1938 and noticed there were no dry-docks for repairing ships.

“He says, ‘This is stupid, there are no docks for repair and it’s 4,200 miles to San Diego.’”

Moreell ordered the construction of two repair docks, saying, “Suppose our ships are damaged by a Japanese surprise attack?”

Two weeks after Pearl Harbor Moreell sold F.D.R. on the need to create construction battalions, better known by the nickname derived from the acronym CB — the Seabees.

Kennedy said Moreell went to New York City and recruited skilled construction workers — 75,000 of them in the first couple of months. Eventually the Seabees had almost 400,000 men, causing the Army to scramble to try and find men for their equivalent outfit.

The Seabees were critical in the Pacific Island-hopping campaign, which had been foreseen back in 1919 by Marine Captain Pete Ellis, an eccentric man who, bored after World War I, wrote a paper called “Advanced Fleet Bases in Micronesia.”

The paper “forecast the entire island-hopping Pacific war,” said Kennedy. He wrote about special forces and landing craft — radical innovations at the time.

Ellis died young but when World War II came the Marines still had the paper. “Only Marine historians know about Ellis.”

Commanded Desert Rats

Percy Hobart was the first commander of what became the British Seventh Armored Division, or The Desert Rats.

Hobart had insulted a superior officer while stationed in Cairo and, as a result, in the middle of the Battle of Britain he was serving as a corporal in the Home Guard, protecting installations from German aircraft with a .303 rifle.

Kennedy’s mentor-to-be Basil Liddell Hart “writes a piece in the Times on ‘The Shame of Not Using Our Talent.’ Churchill reads it, and gets boiling mad.

“He orders Percy reinstated and gives him an experimental division, not a battalion, to get through Normandy.

“Churchill said the war was not going to be won by gentlemen officers who ride their horses around Hyde Park.”

Hobart’s group came up with several innovations for tanks — known as Hobart’s Funnies.

Tweaks included modified Sherman tanks with a flail to explode mines and carve out a path through minefields; a tank equipped with a flamethrower; a tank with a rolled up “sort of Aladdin’s magic carpet” device that enabled the tank to go over hedges or tank traps.

“The Germans had never seen anything like it.”

The Canadians, Kennedy said, especially the ones who got shot up at Dieppe, loved Hobart’s Funnies, but U.S. Gen. Omar Bradley refused to take advantage, referring to it as English public school silliness.

“So Omaha Beach had 3,500 casualties but the Canadians had 28,” Kennedy said.

As much as innovation, “this is a story of obstructionism and blindness,” said Kennedy. “In what circumstances or cultures do the problem solvers operate? Are there CEOs, bosses, university presidents who say ‘Yeah, try it out.’

“The audiences that respond best to this are engineers, scientists and middle management — people dedicated to problem solving.”

The challenge is in transferring the tweaker mentality from the “cultures of encouragement” to the “culture of dislike of changing systems, or rocking the boat.

“I never had as much fun with any book,” Kennedy said of his research for this book. “There were names I didn’t know after 40 years of reading.”

I am writing to make sure you know that we have our second Forum of this year on Friday, October 15th, at 7:30 PM. The Forum topic is “THE U.S. and CHINA – A QUESTION OF OUR COMMON INTERESTS” and our great privilege is to present ORVILLE SCHELL as the speaker. His talk will be in the Katherine M. Elfers Hall of the Easter Eastman Music Center at the Hotchkiss School. A reception for the audience will follow sponsored by the Center for Global Understanding and Independent Thinking.

About the Speaker:

Orville Schell is a renowned China expert/journalist with a unique understanding of China and exceptional access to China’s next generation of leaders. The author of fourteen books, nine of them about China, and the contributor to numerous edited volumes, his most recent books are Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri la from the Himalayas to Hollywood, The China Reader: The Reform Years, and Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders.

In 2007, Orville Schell became director of the new Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society. Prior to that, Schell served as Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

At Salisbury Forums experts provide their insight, followed by a question and answer period. All forums are free to the public.

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Walter DeMelle
President

Paul M. Kennedy, J. Richardson Dilworth professor of British history at Yale University. Author of 19 books including The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, The Parliament of Man, and soon to be released The Engineers of Victory.

Who really won World War II? Was it Roosevelt or Churchill or Marshall or Eisenhower? It was none of the above according to British historian Paul Kennedy. They may have drafted the grand alliances or formulated the master strategies, but it was thousands of men and women assigned specific tasks who had to solve the problems of an incredibly complex worldwide endeavor and make feasible the efforts of millions of Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen. They weren’t the inventors of new weapons or systems. They were tinkerers. Like Steve Jobs in the modern era they had the imagination, vision and flexibility to learn from their mistakes and increase the value of existing technology to unheard of levels.

 Because of their build up of military power in the 1930s the Axis powers gained stunning successes in the early years of the war. The Allies may have had greater resources, but when they convened the Casablanca conference in January 1943 the Allies faced enormous challenges. However, in the next 17 months the tides were turned in the greatest conflict known to human history. What Kennedy examines is how those successes were engineered and by whom. “In this sense,” he says “engineers” are not strictly meant here as people possessing a B.Sc. or Ph.D. in Engineering (although the founder of the Seabees, Admiral Ben Moreell, and the inventor of the mine-detector, Josef Kosacki, certainly did), but as those falling into the Webster Dictionary’s wider definition: “a person who carries through an enterprise through skillful or artful contrivance”.

 Most of us have read about or seen movies about the breaking of the Enigma Code or the inspiration for the bouncing dam buster bombs or the creation of unusual tanks that could push through coastal minefields, barbed wire or hedgerows. But Kennedy says we have rarely stepped back and understood how their work surfaced, was cultivated or how these various eccentric pieces of the jigsaw-puzzle fitted into the whole. Think about the enormity of the tasks they faced. How to move millions of soldiers across oceans, how to plan five simultaneous landings on D-Day or create a powerful radar system that could be inserted in the nose of a long-range patrol aircraft and turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic.

This is the story Kennedy tells of how small groups of individuals and institutions, both civilian and military, succeeded in achieving victory in the critical middle years of the war. It is about what the military-operational problems were and who the problem solvers were, how they got things done and why their work constitutes an important field of study.

Rich Wilson was one of 30 competitors who entered the 2008-2009 Vendee Globe, solo, non-stop, round the world sailing race. After 121 days of hurricane force winds, crushing fatigue and broken gear he was one of only 11 starters to complete the grueling 28,790 mile race. At 58 he was the oldest skipper in the race. He was also the only American and the only asthmatic. Along the way he endured broken ribs, a facial gash and compressed vertebrae. At one point he had to climb the 90 foot mast on his 60′ monohull Great American III to keep going.

Rich Wilson began sailing with his Dad at the age of 3. Over the years he has set three world sailing records: From San francisco to Boston by way of Cape Horn in 1993, New York to Melbourne by way of Cape of Good Hope in 2003 and Hong Kong to New York by way of Cape of Good Hope in 2003. In 1990 he suffered a disastrous double capsize in 65′ seas off Cape Horn. But he survived to successfully challenge the record for that route held by the great clipper ships. He is described as articulate, philosophical, humorous and modest. “Having been upside down in a trimaran 400 miles west of Cape Horn in 65′ seas, I know my place in the universe, and it is small,” he says.

Wilson has led a diverse and accomplished life. He earned an A.B. Degree in Mathmatics at Harvard College and has Master’s Degrees from M.I.T. and Harvard Business School. He taught math in Boston, was a defense analyst on B-52s and cruise missiles, was a writer for the Dukakis presidential campaign and wrote Racing a Ghost Ship which won the 1997 Scientific American Young Readers Book Award. He was named “Super Achiever” by the American Lung Association.

Now a motivational speaker he is the President and Founder of sitesAlive!, an online, interactive, learning adventure series of 75 programs for K-12 education.

Kronman, a former dean of the Yale Law School and currently teaching in that university’s Directed Studies Program, said that Weber, speaking to students in Munich aganst the backdrop of Germany’s impending defeat in World War I and rising social unrest, was concerned that academic life in the modern university was increasingly disconnected from the spiritual foundations of Christian Europe.

Weber, according to Kronman, saw a problem in that academics were increasingly concerned with adding to the world’s accumulated store of knowledge in their particular disciplines, knowing all the while that any unique contribution was certain to be superseded in short order, and thus ephemeral.

Kronman said that Weber felt that God had been exiled from public institutions and cultural life — “stripped of a connection with the divine and eternal.”

As the emphasis in academia and modern life shifted from its religious foundation, humanity took over the role of God. “Humans became masters of their future; and their endeavors were increasingly “defined by their transience.”

He said the American tradition of higher education began with small colleges dedicated to turning out “young Christian gentlemen.” Students learned a core curriculum of classics, sciences and mathematics, taught by polymath professors who could and did teach any subject.

The faculty of those colleges (almost all of which had a specific religious affiliation), understood their purpose as the “transmission of old knowledge, not the creation of new knowledge.”

But as the modern research university evolved, and separate departments were established, the emphasis shifted to adding to the store of knowledge.

Kronman pointed to the growing secularization of American life, the growing diversity of society with the waves of immigration in the latter half of the 19th century (and into the early 20th century), the subsequent reinforcement of “consumerist ambition” and the work of Charles Darwin as factors that resulted in the de-emphasis of God.

Kronman then took an unexpected turn, arguing for a new kind of academics that moves between a rational, Aristotelian view of the world and what he called “the God of Abraham.”

Using Whitman as a starting point, Kronman spoke of the individual as “an unduplicable reflection of the divine,” and then connected to Spinoza, the 17th-century Jewish writer, and his particular view of faith as a means of reconnecting the modern university student’s work “to something invulnerable to time, and thus save it from the meaningless.”

Or, as Kronman unapologetically put it, to seek salvation.

‘Human Terrain’ is an expose of the U.S. effort to enlist America’s best and the brightest in a global struggle for the hearts and minds of its enemies. After winning the short battle of ’shock and awe’ in Iraq, but losing the long war to bring democracy and peace to the Middle East, the U.S. military began a controversial program to ‘operationalize’ culture as an instrument of irregular warfare. With the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ that produced hi-tech, low-casualty victories in Panama, Bosnia, and Kosovo tarnished by long and costly counter-insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army and Marine Corps enlist anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and other academics in ‘Human Terrain Systems’ for the global war on terror.

Filmmakers James Der Derian, David Udris and Michael Udris track this major shift in U.S. military policy as it ripples through American universities and civil society. Simultaneously a road-trip into the heart of the war machine and a critical investigation of academic collaboration with the military, ‘Human Terrain’ traces a new ‘revolution in military affairs’ after U.S. policies based on virtual technologies and virtuous ideologies fail to create peace, and foot soldiers are left to clean up the mess.

Anthony Kronman, Ph.D., Sterling Professor of Law, Yale University, presented a stimulating lecture December, 2, 2011, on disenchantment as defined by Max Weber, the German philospher where scientific understanding is more highly prized than belief. Dr. Kronman pointed out that during the first two hundred years of university education in America students were taught knowledge that had been accumulated in a classical context. The base of that education was religion. In the last hundred years, he said, universities have departed from the ideal of learning the great philosophies of the ages. Instead the emphasis is on finding new knowledge. For example, he pointed to the demand on doctrinal candidates to produce a body of new knowledge based on their research rather than demonstrating their grasp of all that has come before. The problem for students and for society is that striving for secular success leaves the individual with no grounding in the everlasting and no ties with the continuity of a divinity.

Anthony T. Kronman, J.D., Ph.D., Author, Sterling Professor of Law (Yale Law School) Visiting Global Professor (NYU) Teacher in the Directed Studies Program (Yale)

Why are we here? Anthony Kronman says our colleges and universities are ignoring life’s biggest questions and we all pay the price. Students today find an academic environment richer than any have known before. They will find courses devoted to every question under the sun. But the questions that are missing deal with the meaning of life, what one should care about and why and what living is for.

Dr. Kronman says that in a shift of historic importance. America’s colleges and universities have largely abandoned the idea that life’s most important question is an appropriate subject for the classroom. In doing so, he says, “They have betrayed their students by depriving them of the chance to explore it in an organized way before they are caught up in their careers and preoccupied with the urgent business of living itself.”

Our top universities have embraced a research driven ideal, he says. In the process they have badly weakened the humanities, the disciplines with the oldest and deepest connections to this question, leaving them directionless and vulnerable to being hijacked for political ends. “In the sciences the adoption of the research ideal has produced astounding results” he says. “Our knowledge of the natural and social worlds,and ability to control them, is a direct result of the modern system of academic research.”  He describes political correctness as a stifling culture of moral and political uniformity based on progressive ideals. But he says, “Political correctness is only a symptom, a discouraging response to a larger sense of directionlessness in the humanities.”

“America’s entire leadership class now goes to college. Infusing higher education with a new and vibrant humanism will produce benefits not only for the future leaders of business and government but for society at large,” he says. It will give us, he says, ”A richer and more open debate about ultimate values; an electorate less likely to be cowed into thinking that only the faithful have the right to invoke them; a humbler regard for the mystery of life in a world increasingly dominated by technocratic reason.”

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That’s where the horror film stuff comes in.

It turns out that the saliva of the vampire bat is very effective in keeping blood from clotting.

“When bitten you bleed like a stuck pig,” said Plotkin, adding that the trade name for the drug, which could be used to treat stroke victims, is “Draculine.”

Venturing into Carlos Castaneda territory, Plotkin said that when the shaman offers the mystical brew, the anthropologist declines, wishing to retain objectivity.

The ethnobotanist, on the other hand, “Says Yee-Haw!”

But beta blockers, commonly prescribed for patients with heart problems, were the result of research on hallucinogenic (or “magic”) mushrooms in Mexico.

Plotkin said that curare, a poison obtained from the aptly named poison dart frog and applied by indigenous peoples on, you guessed it, poison darts, is also the source of a surgical muscle relaxant and has potential as a non-opiate pain killer.

And consider the giant Amazon green monkey frog. “These are the ones you lick,” Plotkin said.

He described one Westerner’s experience: After licking the frog, his blood pressure soared, and “he woke up in a hammock six hours later, and felt like God for two days.”

But what about the blood pressure rise? That’s what interested researchers.

Plotkin’s bottom line: The Amazon rain forest is the potential source of an incredible variety and amount of medicines, and it needs to be protected.

The Amazon Conservation team’s approach relies on indigienous people acting as stewards of land protected from development, noting that officially protected park areas in Brazil, regions the size of Belgium, are patrolled by a force of three guards who live a hundred miles away.

“Why would they want to live in the park? No showers, refrigerators, television. The people are naked, painted, they have poison — and they’re pissed off.”

By contrast, the areas of similar size that are reserved for the indigenous tribes have several thousand inhabitants, who carry in their heads the location and use of hundreds of potential medicines.

Plotkin showed how a map of one reserve was created after interviewing the locals. The map is covered with hundreds of symbols indicating the location of a plant or animal the Indians have a specific use for.

Creating this kind of database means striking a balance between cultures — not the easiest task.

“We know there is an essential role for Western science and technology,” Plotkin said. “We try to empower the Indians to take control of their destinies.”

Plotkin claims 10 million acres of rain forest have been saved as the result of this approach, dubbed “Map-Manage-Protect.”

But the rain forest continues to be developed — for timber, to open up land for ranching. Plotkin finds this short-sighted and unacceptable.

The Amazon “is the greatest expression of life on Earth, and it’s being trashed and burned, taking with it the incredible potential for medicines.

But, he noted, “Conservation is first a spiritual exercise. We all sleep better knowing there are wild lands.”